A significant percentage of Newbern residents, Black and white, live below the poverty level. When Lewis, who was born in Newbern, moved her family back to the area, she decided to open a non-profit that would provide needed services, like food distributions, to people across Hale county.
She found out that Braxton was still trying to take his seat as mayor. And she joined forces with him to remedy the chaotic political situation, largely by themselves.
In October of last year, Lewis took her children to the movies. The evening quickly turned horrific as they arrived back home.
Lewis’s house was on fire. The family arrived just in time to see the second story collapse.
Lewis said it wasn’t until she began receiving hate mail that she realized there might be a connection between the fire and her support for Braxton. One note she received reads: “You f**cking nr bh get your nr ass out of my town right now with non nr mayor braxton or die or get burn down. I’ve been watching you 4 kids right and your nr new home. If you do [sic] get out of my town you and that n*r non mayor Braxton gona [sic] die.” The letter included images of swastikas and a drawing of Braxton and Lewis being hung from a tree.
Braxton, too, started experiencing retaliation after he won. He has been ostracized by some members of the white community in town, though, some support him and still consider him both a friend and their mayor.
When Black families called in to report fires, he would be the only firefighter to show up to the call. He would have to call firefighters from neighboring towns to help.
Later, a Black woman flagged Braxton down to tell him her elderly sister had gone into cardiac arrest. Braxton ran to the fire department to get a defibrillator, but he had been locked out of the building. He drove home, returned to the department, got the machine and tried to revive the woman, but it was too late.
Following the incident, Stokes and the council served Braxton, who has won awards for his service as a firefighter, with papers for suspension from the department, accusing him of theft and not showing up for trainings. After the Hale county emergency management agency director intervened, Braxton was reinstated.
Braxton has also spotted drones following him and his wife around town, at their home and at his mother’s home. At one point, he said, a white man attempted to run him off the road.
This story is horrifying and disgusting. Disgust because I can’t believe the petty shit those people stooped to, and horror because it’s KKK shit from a century ago with drones added to the mix.
What I don’t understand:
133 person town.
80% Black, 20% White.
106:27Blacks have an almost 4:1 majority.
You solve this problem by riding the racist whites out of town on a rail. It would not be difficult.
All it takes is for the majority to decide they’re fed up with it.
This doesn’t take into account the long history in Alabama (and the south more broadly), of which some residents likely have personal experience, of living in an area where a white minority can enact incredible violence on the black majority with support from the state and sometimes federal government. This isn’t something where the neighboring counties (or even states) are just going to watch it happen, every bigot that’s been listening to right wing talk shows for the past decade is going to be drawn to that like a moth to a flame. A lot of people very understandably do not want to risk bringing that down on their community.
Which isn’t to say what’s happened to him is good or understandable or justifiable, but that’s why people don’t just form a mob to deal with it.
a lot of counties in the cotton belt have looked like this since pre-civil war, when all men of the white minority were required, by law, to be armed and trained to assist in suppressing any slave insurrection. after the civil war, there was considerable upheaval in these places that the powerful minority had to suppress. incarceration, political violence, state terror were all financed and deployed to prevent the new majority of enfranchised black americans from accessing state power or making common cause with broke whites.
on the left, we talk a lot about the foucalt’s boomerang of imperial tactics of oppression returning from the colonies to the metropole as fascism. but there is literature out there articulating the unique laboratory of settler states engaging in exploitation and resource extraction informing later imperial policy. i.e. The South (of the US) functioned as an experimentation site for the US to sharpen its claws in developing extractive, exploitative political projects to export abroad.
the national forgetting of this place and its critical history (and its rich history of violent insurrection against capitalism) allows its legacy and function as a political project to continue to this day. make no mistake, the suppression of “Critical Race Theory” and larger suppression of history education in the south is just as much about forgetting what came before as it is about keeping the lid on today and into the future. think about how many meat packers and industrial concerns have relocated to The South in the last 100 years, where unionization rates are always in the toilet for some mysterious reason. i’m sure it has nothing to do with the police being given wide latitude for violence and strike breaking. the large, diverse and exploited labor force is still here, under the boot of capital.
the project of US capitalism is to turn every place on the planet into the southern US. we are tomorrow’s people.
The key is not to talk about it, but to simply do it. Some racists wind up mysteriously full of holes face down in a ditch? Huh, weird. Anyway…
Just like they have been doing to black people for decades if not centuries.
Why can’t people just be cool
How are the feds not on this?
They are. They’re in on it
Because the federal government doesn’t care about this type of reactionary shit, sundown towns still very much exist with longstanding white families in power for decades. Shits fucked when you live in a settler state in denial about itself.
It’s like that movie boys don’t cry, where people are so full of hate that you just don’t understand them no longer. It’s like an uncontrolled lashing out.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Stokes acquiesced and gave him a key, but when Braxton entered the building, he found that town hall had been stripped of its records, beyond a couple boxes of discarded items that looked like trash.
The battle of the locks was part of a long power struggle that started earlier that year when Braxton won the first mayoral election in the town in over a century.
Stokes returned, told him that he could not find the documents and that Braxton would have to drive to the Peoples Bank in Greensboro, where Newbern’s postmaster, Lynn Thiebe, worked, for the papers.
In the brief filed by Stokes and his allies in response to Braxton’s lawsuit, they argue that they did not act in the wrong “in attempting to rectify a decades old mistake by holding a special election”.
When Lewis, who was born in Newbern, moved her family back to the area, she decided to open a non-profit that would provide needed services, like food distributions, to people across Hale county.
Following the incident, Stokes and the council served Braxton, who has won awards for his service as a firefighter, with papers for suspension from the department, accusing him of theft and not showing up for trainings.
The original article contains 2,287 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That is the best summary? What the fuck. It left me so confused I had to read the actual article to understand just how useless that “summary” is.
Yeah the bots “summaries” are shit. It doesn’t care about properly relaying information, just reducing that word count. I mean “saved 91%”? Of what? Certainly not time!
To be fair, usually it does work, but then it reduces by something like 50 %. Would be cool if GPT would run that show and also not reduce it too much. Understanding what is actually relevant information is key.
Removed by mod
Did you not read the letter they received? Pretty sure race is part of it…
The town was 80% black and 20% white. The fact that none of the supermajority black residents were never a mayor/councillor also corroborates that it was certainly race related.
I would argue only a racist could look at this and not think that race was involved. Holy crap.
Man literally got a letter with swastikas and depictions of hanging.
“I know there’s like half a dozen instances of the n-word being used in the article in reference to messages the person received, but it’s tooooooootally not racism, guys!”
^white guys will look for every excuse to not call something racist
Please don’t lump all of us in with that degenerate.
Indeed, if you blame it on their race, it robs them of all agency and accountability. If their race dictates their actions, what’s their motivation for change?
They’re acting like this because they’re petty narcissistic racists, not because they’re pale of skin.
I disagree, it’s the south, that’s how it is, special clubs of white people running even black majority areas somehow through massive gerrymandering.
This is why we had to approve their voting districts until the Supreme Court said nah, because they always do shit like this.
You didn’t read the article did you?
